The Hitchhikers Guide to the New Economy

The private equity that TDV started with has kept it going. The initial seed round came in December 1995, most of it from the Honorable Alex Cato, a member of a well-known British banking family. Viacom, through Simon & Schuster, funded the company on a project basis by offering licensing or collaboration. Others consulted include AT&T and Apple. "They could have raised much more, but they wanted to keep full creative control," one interested investor notes. "We've held onto all the equity," Stamp says. "We've lived with less in order to have more control. We'll see how Starship Titanic performs. If it matches expectations, we'll grow the company organically from the cash it throws off. I would have preferred not to be as reliant on Starship Titanic as we are. But I'm very proud of it. It will piggyback off the great interest in all things Titanic. And," he emphasizes, "it's not the only thing we are doing." This fall, for example, h2g2 online will debut.

Meantime TDV has slimmed down from 25 people to just 20. The company's offices moved from Camden, a jazzy, barely gentrified neighborhood in London, to Covent Garden, "a safer part of the city," says Stamp. He blames himself for the shortfall between TDV's reality and its ideal: "I allowed the wrong producer to be in place too long - which accounts for the delays on Starship Titanic. The company is now a year older. I know whose judgment I can trust. When you come together as a group but you haven't been through anything yet, you've got very few fixed points. Now we've been under enormous pressure. We've learned a great deal."

Arthur was about to have his head cut open ... and Ford and Zaphod were about to be set upon by several thugs a great deal heavier and more sharply armed than they were. All in all it was extremely fortunate that at that moment every alarm on the planet burst into an ear-splitting din. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

For his part, Adams views TDV's turbulence with a storyteller's confidence. Conflict isn't a problem - it's the point. What's a story without drama? What would h2g2 be without Arthur Dent lying in front of a ravenous yellow bulldozer? Or without the Earth facing obliteration at the hands of Vogons? Or without a little ear-splitting din? If you can tell how it ends, it's not a great story.

Adams is sitting in the Groucho Club, a London eating establishment that is a favorite haunt of writers and performers. Overhead the moon is a little too full of itself, but that just makes everything larger and more vivid than usual. Adams is describing a new idea: "Total Capture." It's a beautiful dream, like everything else in this embryonic phase of TDV's development, when he and Stamp might find themselves holding either a real baby - or just bathwater.

Total Capture, like h2g2, fell out of the sky and into Adams's robust imagination. "The night sky in ancient Egypt was like television today," Adams says. "People watched it, and took their entertainment and information from it. I want to recreate that feeling of the sky over the pyramids - those tales that ancients told each other about the distant lights they claimed to see. Total Capture of the night sky, of every night that ever looked down on the cradle of civilization - that's what I want to put onto the Web."

For a solid minute, it's possible to see Adams skimming the sky with a butterfly net, the way the rest of us climb a ladder to change a lightbulb. Creative highs are possible for him not because he thinks about "new markets" or "new products" but because he starts from the rules of creativity.

"I learned as a storyteller that when you change the scale of something, new details come into view," says Adams. "If something's bothering you, think about it as a bigger problem than it is: Think about it as a galaxy-wide problem."

If space is half of the science-fiction equation, then time is the other half. To achieve maximum impact, Adams says, change the scale along that dimension as well: "I can show you a picture of a scene today, and another picture of a scene the next day, and another the day after that. Since they're all the same, after a while you say, 'This is boring.' But if I show them to you at 24 frames a second, you say, 'Oh, a movie!' "

Change the two together - alter the time-space continuum - and you have the formula for creativity in the new economy. "One of the most powerful forces in nature is about to come into view in the online medium: the feedback loop - where the input stage of one iteration is the output stage of another iteration," Adams says. "Feedback loops are what drive evolution. You put pesticide on a field to kill off pests, and the next generation is bred exclusively from the pest that's survived."

So Starship Titanic is not merely a product; it's a virtual pesticide. It will draw a new generation of fans into h2g2 online, where they will be immersed in Adams's way of looking at the world - their psychic DNA altered by contact with this DNA.